I Will Do Better, page 3
Truth is, our home was no stranger to sitters. When Diana was sick, having Lily around may have nourished her soul, but there was no way she could physically look after the kid. Taking Lily to indoor areas with other children wasn’t an option, as it meant the risk of Lily bringing home germs to Diana, who basically had no immune system. Our toddler could not sit still for three literal seconds, but wasn’t able to go to day care, couldn’t attend story time at a library, wasn’t even allowed to run with and touch other children at playgrounds. Our solution involved setting fire to part of our meager savings, hiring shifts of young women. Ko, a Vietnamese student in her early twenties, became a mainstay, doing yeoman’s work through Diana’s final month, occupying Lily’s days with trips to museums, and venturing to restaurants deep in Brooklyn, where Ko’s friends worked. (During down moments after the lunch rush, they taught Lily how to use chopsticks.)
As I healed from my accident, I kept relying on Ko; after a few weeks, she stopped showing up, blew off my texts.
I interviewed an alumnus from my grad school. Dyed hair, nose ring, teeming with good energy, she seemed like a perfect part-time nanny.
First afternoon on the job, she started slurring, slouched on the couch—a total heroin nod. She managed to drag herself back into consciousness, rose, and staggered out the front door, never to return.
The network of friends who’d helped during Diana’s illness had stopped calling and coming over, receding back into their lives. Understandable; there were limits to how much time people could give, right? Reader, when I asked for help, my in-box filled with referrals. Contact info. Gushing emails. The bubbly junior publicist with golden tresses and extensive babysitting experience; the charming daughter who was home after college and between jobs: Lindsey, Lauren, Liza, even names that did not begin with L. Always in their early twenties. Broke as shit. Scraping together a side hustle. Willing to potentially babysit weekends. Might be able to work a few nights a week, until internship.
Laid out on the sofa bed that Diana and I had purchased at a thrift store whose proceeds went to fighting AIDS, I kept dribbling my basketball against the glazed brick wall, thereby increasing my hand strength, dexterity, and coordination.
Laid out on my late wife’s yoga mat, talking on my landline, I negotiated with the banking rep who steadfastly refused—no matter how much documentation I sent—to transfer the remaining money from Diana’s account into one set up in Lily’s name.
Sitting in the ergonomic rolling chair I’d purchased for myself from a fancy catalogue right after I’d sold the book, I kept my Nokia perched against my ear and listened. My sister Crystal continued her role as my lifelong best friend and buoy. She let me know she was still unearthing clothes from Lily’s stay during my hospital ordeal, planned on bringing everything over as soon as she found a spot in her schedule. Crystal had a young son almost Lily’s age, was pregnant to boot. She nonetheless asked if she could pick up anything special that I or the little cannoli might like. Then, in her unique, supportive, and thoroughly no-bullshit way, Crystal flipped a switch, dispensed with the preliminaries, and started laying down the law, informing me that Manhattan day care was no joke and I had to get off my ass and fill out those applications. And I’d better ask friends for those letters of recommendation. And it did not matter if the fall was nine months away, Charles. She knew I was grieving. But she was on my side here. So, please, I had to not be a dick. Just take care of this.
I mumbled assurances.
I watched the next sitter, Michele, overcome the introductory burst of shyness that served as my daughter’s opening gambit.
I watched the sitter after that. Kneeling down on our living room rug (nicknamed “the snow rug throw rug”), she learned about the adventures of a stuffed animal, in the process winning Lily’s confidence.
Lily let these young women put her hair in ponytails and clips.
Let them put food into her mouth.
Let them bathe her and towel her off.
She engaged with them, learned how to be coy with them, how to charm them. She followed their leads, repeated their phrases, absorbed their mannerisms.
Lauren bartered with her (follow enough instructions, Lily got a lollipop); Liza always took her to the CVS (for nail polish? a glittery headband?). When Lindsey came around, Lily asked, “We go to Baskin-Robbins?” Lindsey made her promise: afterwards, she’d brush brushy brush her teeth.
Corralling those golden tresses into her knit cap, Lindsey confirmed the dates of her next visit, slipped the check into her coat pocket. “Okay, I’m leaving.” Her voice was purposefully theatrical. “Anybody want to say goodbye?”
Sitting at the little white table that served as her desk and meal area, Lily made a point of concentrating on her drawing. A singsong response: “No, I don’t.”
“All right, see you later!”
In the hallway, they’d hug. Before that, however, as per their ritual, Lindsey had to open our front door. And when this happened, Lily turned desperate. Arms pumping, running as hard as she could, Lily had to give chase. Before the young woman left, Lily had to catch her.
SCOTT FITZGERALD FAMOUSLY intoned that plot is character. His reasoning was that the situation a character finds themselves in always ends up an outgrowth of who he or she is. Looking back, I see that I was an overgrown, adult child myself.
I write this ten years after the fact. From such distance, I can see how I wanted to have it both ways: to make sure Lily was cared for and happy, yes, but at the same time to continue to basically sweep in on the weekends and tickle, doing the minimum, or the near minimum, so as to stay inside my pillowy bubble of creative, arrested development, claiming I was taking care of the kid when actually I was avoiding the true work of parenting. Terrified of it.
I did not want to do this. I did not want to raise this child.
But the die had been rolled. Such was my task. Such was my journey. And whether or not I loved my daughter (most def); whether I’d taken responsibility for her of my own free will (certainly I had not); whether I was setting out on this lifelong journey by choice (also no); whether I was mentally prepared for or capable of what I was undertaking (good one); whether I was mature enough, had the discipline required, the necessary self-awareness, the abilities for reflection, adaptation; whether I could cede my ego and petty desires; whether I would sabotage myself, come up short, lash out, self-destruct, and /or try to quit—none of these questions mattered; at the very least, they were less significant than the raw truth, the larger happening, this journey already underway.
Our ramshackle love story was already unfolding. This was going to define me.
Was I up to the challenge?
My little girl had returned from the hallway. She was by my side, reaching for my hand, a pink pixie wanting to perch herself on the green ogre’s shoulder.
Fuck.
CHAPTER THREE
Studies show that losing one’s mother during an early age is likely to do long-term damage to a child’s self-esteem, to her capacity to express feelings and to trust. The younger the kid is when she loses her mother, the more likely she is to develop anxiety and behavioral issues, as well as problems with drugs and alcohol. Girls who lose their mothers are more likely to become sexually active earlier in life. They are more likely to have difficulties maintaining relationships as adults, and they tend to develop an unconscious fear of intimacy.
So then, like, what if the girl isn’t properly taught by her father to look both ways before crossing the street, and on a snowy day is eager to get to the park with her sled, and she runs into traffic, all while her dad is busy reading a text with yet another round of edits for a freelance piece that he needs done, as he needs that check to clear?
What about … if Dad reminds her to wear her scarf but forgets to say one word about her gloves, and she goes out and keeps her hands in her pockets to avoid freezing, but it’s still too cold outside, and she gets frostbite and loses the top of her right thumb?
If she grows up thinking pizza is health food?
If she doesn’t learn to clean up after herself, doesn’t know how to make her bed, can’t put on a fitted sheet?
If she gets the date wrong, forgets to carry the number into the next column?
If she leaps from seeking the approval of her dad to needing the approval of some dreamy guy from the junior college and is knocked up before she’s sixteen?
If she doesn’t learn how to go along to get along? If she is like her dad and doesn’t have an internal filter and constantly says the wrong thing? If she can’t listen, can’t hear what’s really being said to her?
If she does not understand or employ traditional feminine wiles that, offensive though it may be to admit, are necessary to getting along in a patriarchy? If she cannot use flattery and flirtation as tools—to entice, to defuse, to protect and promote herself?
Or, conversely, if she does not have confidence in her intelligence? If she doesn’t know when to speak up? If she is defensive, secretive, paranoid, unable to trust, unable to love?
If she makes bad deals, hurries into lopsided partnerships, capsizes friendships, torches important relationships? If she fucks up and fucks up and keeps on fucking things up?
I couldn’t think this way.
FOR NOW, ALL hail the ass end of winter! Praise be its therapeutic powers! Soft cast falling away. Right arm mostly functional. Right hip still diminished, but stronger, no longer in need of that contraption; my body actually kinda sorta working!
Similarly transformed was the cluttered world of our apartment—I mean, yes, it was every bit as overstuffed; there was little to zero light in the living room and bedroom; the kitchen remained a kitchenette, just one person at a time could use it. The great majority of the place’s walls continued to be thin as rice paper, only now the rice paper walls were bright with primary colors. Cardboard posters that had scribbly Magic Marker drawings tacked to them; a chalkboard with positive sayings; charts with completed tasks translating into shiny stars—in short, any image that could make our home look cheery and bright, as opposed to a ship’s hold at midnight. Huge swaths of my first novel had been written down in the bottom of this dark hold, with me listening to late-night sports talk radio; now I kept a midnight bedtime rule (okay, sometimes I stretched it to one), so I’d be fresh in the morning for the little girl. Similar reasoning meant sayonara to my usual four-day scruff of facial hair, to my Buddhist beads that weren’t around my wrist for reasons of peace and love but because they looked like a bunch of skulls, to my T-shirts celebrating the baroque and hard rocking and sexually provocative. Instead, this child would know her father as clean-shaven, put together, reasonably neat, someone who wiped his lenses clean on the regular, who was not at all beneath the bottom of a well.
Almost noon. Here’s Lily in her pink Hello Kitty jammies, wanting to know: “Why do forks have sticks at the end?”
I had been cutting construction paper. I put down the scissors. Using my hand like a broom, I swept up and gathered, from my desk, all these newly formed creations, triangles made of colored pieces of cardboard. “Because space aliens can’t get spaghetti to stick to their tentacles, duh.”
Dumping my misshapen triangles, I spread them, random falling constellations, over the snow rug throw rug, and thus prepared our newest time-wasting activity.
“Okay,” I said. “New game.”
Lily clapped. Soon enough, we were balancing on our toes, stepping carefully, avoiding all colored pieces.
“Don’t step on the stinky cheese,” Lily cackled.
“Step on the stinky cheese,” I warned, “you will get a BLUMPO.”
“A BLUMPO?” More cackling. “What’s a BLUMPO?”
Blum•po. Noun. 1. The penalty for stepping on a fictional slice of stinky cheese. 2. A disruption, whether in the progress of a game or to the joyous nature of an outing. 3. Disagreement, irritation.
How about that collection of gingerbread houses—each one inspired by a New York City landmark—that were on display at the fancy midtown hotel where we ate at the secret hamburger stand? Was that a blumpo?
How about the Brooklyn food trucks we visited? The pop-up temporary tattoo parlor?
Outside of Lincoln Center before the start of the circus, she’d balanced on the lip of the fountains and stretched her poofy-coated arms out wide to the world, and just then the water sprayed out above her and she lit up—amazed, joyous. Did that qualify, was that one of those nefarious blumpos?
Was one found inside the iconic Plaza Hotel, where Eloise inspired chaos? (Lily and I had tea, left the requisite postcard for everyone’s favorite long-term guest.)
Standing on line with me to get into the Lego store in Rockefeller Center. Standing on line with me to ride the carousel under the Brooklyn Bridge. Standing on line with me for the Chelsea Piers carousel. For the carousel at Bryant Park. On line with me at the Fourteenth Street Foot Locker for a re-release of the White Cement Jordan 3s I’d salivated over as a college freshman but never owned.
Truth: I needed places for us to go, classes to take, things for us to do. I lived in terror—mortal terror—of empty afternoons, their procession of minutes without end. How much time could we really burn tiptoeing around cut-out triangles? With a few rounds of memory card games? How much time learning that yellow and blue make green? With simple arithmetic on the laptop and the site’s background music numbing my mind like so much novocaine?
When I was a teenager trying to play basketball, and our team was getting blown out, Coach Mangold used to set incremental goals as a way of getting our squad back into the game: “Let’s cut it to sixteen, let’s get it to ten by halftime.” In my case, this became its own plan: At ten on Saturday we’ll go to the overpriced new retro diner. Then she can play with the Groovy Girls dolls at Barnes & Noble. After nappy time, maybe we hit the math museum.
We did them all. They were exhausting. They worked my patience, frayed my nerves.
Not one was a blumpo.
Even better, for Lily, than all these forays: the chance to share and bond with children her age. YMCA day camp.
The final day, I arrived to find Lily waiting for me, her face especially bright.
Not only had she enjoyed a fifth full day of play; today also had given her cause to feel singularly proud. A week of all those other kids taking trips to the bathroom with the counselors had provided the impetus; she had been able to implement all our prep work and urging (“Pushie with your tushie”) and had scooted over the rim of that physical and olfactory milestone. Our diaper-change song was no longer necessary. A sacrifice, but one that both of us were proud to make. She beamed: “I did it.”
And so there we were, me and my wondrous Tomato Tornado, busting serious ass—at least, as much as my rusty right hip allowed. We were heading east on Fourteenth, returning home, triumphant and celebratory, from the Y. Lily was safely strapped into the seat of our lightweight, but trustworthy Maclaren stroller. Gifted to me by my mom and sis, its rain-resistant fabric was the bright yellow of Big Bird, the yellow of streaming, golden sunlight.
Lily was sort of reclining and looking comfortable, her legs akimbo, her knees pointing in opposite directions. Half sucking her thumb, her eyes glossy, she appeared, in this moment, to be one extremely satiated princess, zoning out until her next entertainment appeared.
Behind her, I was pushing like hell. You can see me: six feet tall or thereabouts, thin but with a bit of a middle from stress snacking, this grown-ass man with Peppa Pig stickers on the shoulder of his monstrous winter coat. I was giving a heads-up to that elderly lady walking her schnauzer.
The top of Lily’s hair bounced in place. She removed the thumb from her kisser, seemed to be speaking. Was something wrong? Just trying to share a thought?
From behind, I couldn’t hear a word. Beneath my coat, my shirt was soaked. (I was perpetually soaked with sweat.)
My hip throbbed. I slowed, leaned forward.
Lily repeated her demand. “Chock-late.”
I answered, “You just had some, love of my life.”
“More,” she said.
“I thought this was over.”
“It’s not over. I want more.”
We passed the college students being paid to solicit pedestrians for charitable contributions.
I ignored them. Aping the lyric of a campy hip-hop smash, I called out: “If there’s a problem?”
(During optimal moments, Lily took my prompt, shouting back: “YO, I’ll solve it.”)
“MORE,” she announced.
And here it was, arriving, the dread blumpo.
The real struggle, of course, hits with the fourth time you have to keep control in response to the exact same situation. The eighth time you have to answer that impossible question that was hard enough, forty minutes ago, under the best of circumstances. The twelfth consecutive time. When you modeled deep breathing. When you followed the advice from parenting websites and changed the subject. When ghosts and grief were crowding your every moment, and you were still looking down the barrel of that impossible question, still had to try to tailor an answer to your child.
Did I understand that tantrums were a manifestation of fear as much as they were from emotional hurt and physical pain?
Pushing the stroller over an uneven, cracked part of that sidewalk, I deliberately gave some extra ummph.
